O’Reilly Radar > The Medium Changes the Preferred Format

O’Reilly Radar > The Medium Changes the Preferred Format:

I think we’ll see this phenomenon all over publishing: the rebirth of short-form content and collections, with the user in charge of the playlist.

It’s already happened on the iTunes store, and it’s the essence of “Rip, Mix, Burn”. In music, the labels had turned the market into one forcing users to buy an album for one or two good songs and 50 minutes of filler. iPod and MP3 players that let you burn your own playlists simply let you edit out the filler, and the iTunes store let you avoid paying for it in the first place.

I’m not so sure this is going to be AS viable in the “text” market. In music, replaying music is a standard part of the experience. you expect to listen to a song many times. In video — rental is more normal, where you only expect to view a movie once and then return it. Text, I think, leans more towards the rental aspect, but it depends on what market segment. For technical stuff, O’Reilly’s Safari system works wonders, because you many times have a need for SHORT-TERM but repeated access to some technical stuff, but then once you’re done, it gets replaced by data for the next project.

For fiction? I’m not so sure. And the trend in fiction has been to longer books, and book series. Fans enjoy revisiting created worlds (just ask Robert Jordan). Does that model work in this new environment?

And to me, the biggest part of this is still missing: how do people FIND the good stuff, once we move to a model where everything is out there and available for browsing? This is the key problem: all of this is data; how do we turn it into information? How do we find the high-value and high-quality information?

All bits are equal — but what the bits make certainly aren’t.

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